Dance Partner
The obvious question that arises is, so what are we orbiting around? The good people at the Binary Research Institute have posited that it is likely to be Barnard’s star, a red dwarf about 15% of our star’s mass. The main arguments for it are that it is one of the closer objects to our system, it is at the appropriate declination to the ecliptic at around 4˚ and that it is rapidly moving towards us. Conveniently, it is supposed to make its closes approach around 10000 AD, very close to the periapsis that we are expecting for the system’s orbit around it.
Let us explore the possibility of an orbit around Barnard’s star and how this may play out with observable parameters. The first observable measure that we need to align to is that the current distance to Barnard’s star is ~5.95 ltYrs. Thus, we must explore the solution to the orbital axis lengths to arrive at the current distance.
Using the Ramanujam approximation, we can compute the Perimeter of the orbit as
Perimeter = π ( 3(a+b) + √(3a+b)(a+3b) )
Perimeter = 19.15 ltYrs
Given that we have traveled 1,523 of the 24,000 years from the Apoapsis of the orbit, the current location is estimated as
This gives us the estimated distance aligned to the current observation of ~5.95 ltYrs based on triangulated approximation. We need to now align this with the observed speed of the sun. Current observations put the speed of the sun measured in relation to the galactic core to be between 225 – 250 km/s. We can check the proposed orbit of 19.15 ltYrs traveled in 24,000 years to compute the velocity of the system.
The Smoking Gun?
The estimated speed of the sun at ~240 km/s is well within the observed range providing additional support to the hypothesized orbital attributes. Is this the smoking gun? There are certain implications that we need to understand that would arise from this proposed elliptical orbit around the red dwarf.
At the Periapsis, the red dwarf will be ~1 light year away from the sun putting that well within the outer edge of the Oort cloud. What impact could a massive object, the size of 48,000 earths, have that far into our neighborhood?
We must alter the model of observed orbit of the red dwarf in relation to our system to fit the parameters of an elliptical orbit.